Introduction

The International Workshop on Defeasible and Ampliative Reasoning (DARe), held in conjunction with ECAI 2014 in Prague, Czech Republic, aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from core areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, philosophy and related disciplines to discuss the defeasible and ampliative aspects of reasoning in a multi-disciplinary forum.

Description and scope

There are expressions of human cognition for which the development of logical formalisations is desirable but particularly problematic, since classical reasoning cannot be straightforwardly applied. Some typical examples are reasoning with uncertainty, exceptions, similarity, vagueness, incomplete or contradictory information and many others. They often show two strongly intertwined aspects:

Ampliative aspect: the ability to make inferences that venture beyond the scope of the premises, in a somehow daring but justifiable way. The focus is on those forms of inference that, moving from true premises, allow the derivation of conclusions that are not necessarily true, but that we are somehow rationally justified in expecting to be true. Some examples are default, inductive and abductive reasoning.

Defeasible aspect: the ability to backtrack one's conclusions or to admit exceptions in reasoning. Some examples are retractive reasoning (e.g., belief contraction and negotiation) and preemptive reasoning (e.g., multiple inheritance networks and in regulatory systems).

The goal of DARe is to present latest research developments on the aforementioned aspects of reasoning, to discuss current directions in the field, and to collect first-hand feedback from the community. Among the foreseen outcomes is the emergence of a framework to relate canonical problems, tools and applications, filling an important gap in the convergence of logical, statistical and probabilistic approaches to defeasibility and ampliativeness in reasoning, as well as to get a better understanding of how to effectively implement these ideas.